What the Wind Blew In

In pursuit of the perfect waist: Vivien Leigh and Hattie McDaniel as Scarlett and Mammy, in Gone With the Wind.Credit
From New Line Cinema, via Associated Press

“Gone With the Wind,” the quintessential Hollywood movie, has long deserved to be rescued from critical disdain and given its correct place among American pop masterpieces, like “The Godfather” and “On the Waterfront” and “E.T.,” that enlighten as much as they entertain. Molly Haskell provides that defense in “Frankly, My Dear: ‘Gone With the Wind’ Revisited,” an earnest work of moviegoer remembrance that’s also affectionate scholarship. Haskell’s argument is mounted on feminist principles that at first glance seem antithetical to a film widely regarded as prefeminist fluff. She contends that “themes centering on women” are “always an inferior subject matter to socially conscious critics of literature and film.” After 70 years of “GWTW” bashing, a creditable critic finally says, “Not so fast!”

Since Haskell introduced one of the earliest versions of feminist-conscious film criticism in “From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies” (1974), feminist criticism hasn’t been very evident in the mainstream media. Haskell gave up regular reviewing in the early ’90s, leaving criticism that seriously examined the big-screen image of women and the popular representation of female social roles to go underground — into academic studies where abstruse, tenure-seeking jargon is used to rebuff popular taste. That makes “Frankly, My Dear” all the more remarkable. It’s Haskell’s feminist perspective that provides insight into a movie most academics won’t touch and current critics dismiss. She disentangles the film’s qualities from the confounding issues of misogy­ny, racism and intellectual snobbery.

Confronting the legendary headstrong heroine Scarlett O’Hara, Haskell explores the power she exerts on the romantic and political imagination — first as a creation in Margaret Mitchell’s best-selling 1936 novel, then as a screen personification by the British actress Vivien Leigh in a Hollywood adaptation produced by the independent mogul David O. Selznick. From these multiple sources Haskell anato­mizes the iconographic Scarlett as a product of proto-feminist literature, a performer’s neuroses and the outsize ambitions of Holly­wood’s first golden age.

Almost like an apology beforehand, Haskell’s biographical sketches and psychological speculations set up an unlikely framework for critical interpretation. Admitting obstacles to her appreciation, she goes back to the battle lines that the initial wave of feminist pop criticism drew between political correctness and Hollywood art: “The feminist angle, and the movie’s profoundly mixed message, came home to me in 1972, when I took part in a panel — one of the first — on the roles of women in film. Gloria Steinem, editor of the newly launched Ms. magazine, brought up ‘Gone With the Wind,’ deploring the spectacle of Scarlett being squeezed into her corset to a 17-inch waist, that perfect illustration of female bondage, Southern style. I sprang to defend her as a fierce, courageous heroine, going her own way, a survivor and so on.” Giving candid testimony to the friction between doctrinaire feminism and emotionally complex movie watching defines Haskell’s critical perception. Several ­lapses — facile connections to Madonna, Barack Obama, Sarah Palin, even Judd Apa­tow — are just mild hazards of criticism as engaged, topical journalism. Mostly, her confessions and investigations revive the new journalism’s practice of personal revelation and private response.

Rejecting accusations of frivolous escapism, Haskell sees the intricate ways that “Gone With the Wind” (the book-and-film phenomenon) derived from the legacy of Southern aristocracy and changed it through the post-suffrage image of female independence. She says her own enthrallment began with teenage reading in Richmond, Va.: “Scarlett embodies the secret masculinization of the outwardly feminine, the uninhibited will to act of every tomboy adolescent, here justified by the rule-bending crisis of war.” Haskell inter­twines her own history with Mitchell’s Georgia background, Leigh’s British origins and Selznick’s Jewish American determination. This personalized approach moves from superficial appreciation of the book and movie’s romanticism to a richer scrutiny of the film as “the example par excellence of this studio-confected world . . . the portrait of a never-never land whose harmony and grace depended on the smoothing out of much that was ugly and uncomfortable.”

Haskell consults the standard reactions to the manner in which the film ignores the turpitude of slavery while sustaining the honor of the Confederacy. Briefly citing Leslie Fiedler — who, in “The Inadvertent Epic,” made a pioneering connection among “Gone With the Wind” and “The Birth of a Nation” and “Roots” — isn’t enough, and her empathic analysis of Hattie McDaniel’s self-conscious role-playing as Mammy could be argued in more detail. But Haskell, a Southerner come north, is well suited to explain the South’s complex racial ambivalence, at one point mentioning how Mitchell “studiously tried to capture black patterns of speech.” It doesn’t excuse the flaws of “Gone With the Wind,” but before Haskell came along, lofty distaste and anger sufficed instead of clarity.

She is most comfortable examining the male-female sexual dynamics. Leigh’s Scarlett and Clark Gable’s Rhett Butler (who provides a climax to their tumultuous saga by uttering the memorable exit line “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn”) have become archetypes of American heterosexual romance — its allure and its collapse. Haskell dissects their images, provocatively hinting at the film’s true basis in screwball comedy. She also contemplates hidden notions of gender identity, Southern mores, Civil War history and early-20th-century sexual fantasy.

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“Frankly, My Dear” praises “Gone With the Wind” for illuminating still-conflicting romantic ideas. This comes at a time when film culture has fragmented into fan-boy/chick-flick dichotomies and populist-­versus-elitist criticism. Haskell’s endeavor, different from high-art appreciation yet not far from it, brings together audience taste and intellectual specification. Since adolescence, her admiration for the film has developed into “a more grown-up affection informed by a film lover’s appreciation of the small miracle by which a mere ‘woman’s film’ with a heroine who never quite outgrows adolescence was transfigured into something much larger, something profoundly American, a canvas that contains, if not Walt Whitman’s multitudes, at least multiple perspectives.”

Haskell’s sense of the “small miracle” is important. It comes from her career-long commitment to movies as a popular art form. Strangely enough, that’s still a crucial fight. She notes that “Scarlett and Rhett may not be on the same level as such towering archetypes of American literature as Captain Ahab, Daisy Miller, Isabel Archer, Huck Finn and Hester Prynne or even such cinematic monuments as Charles Foster Kane and John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards in ‘The Searchers,’ but they occupy a more personal, familial place in the fantasies of their admirers.” Arguing for the status withheld by the critical establishment, she en­dorses “Gone With the Wind” as “a historical romance that transcended the genre with the immediacy of its mix of sex and feminism.” Yet that quotation refers to the book rather than the movie. Haskell’s literary defense sometimes neglects the film’s pop-art immediacy.

Observing that “emotional appeal and secret fantasy run roughshod over ideol­ogy,” Haskell offers her most effective vindication of the film when she describes how Leigh “invested Scarlett with something beyond beauty, something altogether uncanny — a demonic energy, a feverishness that would later tip over into illness and pathology.” But more important than this cynical hindsight is Haskell’s recognition of Leigh’s Scarlett as an exemplary, indefatigable American movie heroine. While placing the film among the biggest blockbusters of all time, along with “Star Wars,” “The Sound of Music,” “E.T.” and “Titanic,” Haskell curiously misses its link to the box-office champ “The Godfather,” which Paul Zimmerman of Newsweek shrewdly praised in 1972 as “the ‘Gone With the Wind’ of gangster movies.” Haskell could clinch her argument with a comparison between the two films’ protagonists.

Clearly Scarlett’s determination shares psychological roots with the Corleone demonstration of American ruthlessness. Haskell’s description of “a strange double standard whereby the ‘likable family’ — the Sopranos or the Corleones — is forgiven the most appalling behavior” begs that appropriate feminist sympathy be applied to Scarlett, who wheels and deals to defend her family and save Tara. Haskell writes that Scarlett “stands apart from herself, a masquerade of the feminine, as the mirror returns a gaze that is both her own and implicitly that of the man for whom the presentation is intended.” This assessment of the female identity that once was Hollywood’s specialty pinpoints the greatness of “Gone With the Wind” as convincingly as Ellen Willis’s memorable 1973 feminist defense of the film, “ ‘War!’ Said Scarlett. ‘Don’t You Men Think About Anything ­Important?’ ”

Haskell credits the film’s uniqueness not just to the phalanx of directors who worked on it but to Selznick’s supervision as the producer: “If not on the level of the great women’s directors and producers like Josef von Sternberg, Max Ophüls and Ingmar Bergman, he shared with them a richly ambidextrous mix of desire and identification.” And she admirably combines her own romanticism and critical principles in her appraisal of the controversial moment when Rhett forces himself on Scarlett: “Contexts change, perceptions shift, it’s one of the things that makes movies such a dynamic medium. . . . Women’s so-called rape fantasy, as I wrote in an article for Ms., did not have to be the expression of a masochistic desire for violence, some fearful encounter with an anonymous assailant in a back alley, but rather could be a carefully orchestrated drama of losing control under specific conditions and in well-chosen hands. In other words, it’s when Robert Redford (or Clark Gable) won’t take ‘no’ for an answer.” Feminist criticism has never been more daring.

In Haskell’s thoughtful revisionism, Scarlett comes to embody personal and national contradictions. The chapter “E Pluribus Unum” shows how the “dualisms” of her creators were gathered into a credibly whole personality. Focusing on Scarlett’s turbulent, childlike ways, Haskell illustrates the traits of beauty, self-regard and “the uninhibited will to act” that have made “Gone With the Wind” one of the least dated classic Hollywood movies. These attributes will always be disputed, but Haskell’s critical sensitivity rescues Scarlett’s Americanism and femininity, indicating how her image redounds upon our eternal political struggles and deepest fantasies. Haskell clarifies the long shadow that Scarlett O’Hara casts over the American movie imagination.

FRANKLY, MY DEAR

“Gone With the Wind” Revisited

By Molly Haskell

Illustrated. 244 pp. Yale University Press. $24

Armond White is the chief film critic for New York Press and chairman of the New York Film Critics Circle. His book “What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Movies” will be published this spring.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR14 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: What the Wind Blew In. Today's Paper|Subscribe